Wanting To Be Haunted
by The Cry-Wank Kid
Summary: ON HIATUS. AKA The Best of Dadneto and Momstique. Erik and Raven reconnect with Peter and Kurt, who also proceed to get into shenanigans together. A collection of one-shots with maybe some overarching storyline.
1. Promise To Try

**A/N: Hi everybody! This is my first story in this fandom. It pretty much is what the description says: a random place to get my Dadneto/Momstique feels out post-Apocalypse. Hopefully someone else enjoys them, too! All of these stories are set during or shortly after the Apocalypse movie storyline.** **PS- Go listen to the Madonna song mentioned here. It didn't actually come out until 1989, but you know, men don't manipulate metal IRL either so who cares?**

 **Enjoy!**

* * *

Berlin, much like the world, has exactly two types of dancing girls. They look the same, but Raven knows the difference. The ones with certain backgrounds, love at home, dance wildly and lightly in the clubs, their feet electric. Raven does too, but there's a fever to it. A madness. If she thought that she possessed it, she might even call it fear.

* * *

Tits out in her lace-up top, forever twenty-four and feeling so much older, she hardly looks a mother. She wonders if he likes girls yet, if he likes girls at all, and if he does whether he'll ogle them awkwardly, not knowing; if he'll want to rub against them for the wrong reasons. Either way, she decides, it's a fitting metaphor: her teenaged baby trawled out in an obscene metal coffin in the middle of a fight club. He tumbles out, and she isn't ready for the jolt it makes inside her when he hits the ground. She didn't expect to feel much, but he looks like her.

She winces, surveying the form she and his father gave him-the form she can run from, the form that Azazel filled out so well. But the boy instead appears victim to it, awkward like a sacred heart pin bouncing around inside of a Halloween costume. _The fight_ , is all her blunted mind comes up with; watching him zap in frantic circles around the cage to avoid his opponent: a hard-faced young angel with ragged wings washed the color of playground dirt. Whether it's to avoid hurting him or being hurt, she can't tell. _Where oh where inside him is the fight?_

* * *

Raven slams the cab door, reaching one arm across him to make his side close. Kurt seems too dazed to do as much; and he recognizes her, of course, but for all the wrong reasons.

In German she barks orders to the driver, who wordlessly shifts into drive and pulls out into the night, radio crackling on in tandem with the ignition. At first it's voices, chattering back and forth in guttural jingles, then one smooth announcement, and there's music; the piano intro to "Promise To Try" by Madonna sounding somber through the vehicle's small caverns, making Raven feel as if she's trudging into church.

 _Little girl, don't you forget her face / laughing away your tears / when she was the one / who felt all the pain..._

Kurt's heat next to her is radiant and drowning, as if they are connected by an invisible electric string that she's too close to now to bear comfortably. She feels the threat of tears for the first time in a long time but buries the idea. The boy beside her is vulnerable, needing her for the first time, the last time, and even she isn't selfish enough now to make him console her.

She swallows and looks over, taking in his fluttering eyelids, his lolling head. "You okay?"

He nods. "It's just... the teleportation. Too much of it and I get... tired."

She nods slowly, the picture of steeliness when she pats her breast. She wishes for a moment that she'd worn warmer clothes, something less trendy. "Come here."

His shaky insect weight collapses long across her, his cheek to her chest, and with a stern self-discipline she presses her lips together and chances a tender glance upon him. It's a long one, fading.

"Hey," she says firmly, "you know you're not the freak here, right? Okay? You know it's them..."

Kurt turns, hiding so that the curve of her breast makes a pillow for his face, weeping softy into the meager fabric of her clubwear dress. Raven draws a breath like a choir. Mother _fuck._

In more broken German she yells at the cabby to hurry the fuck up, to not take all night. She leans her head back on the plush seat behind her and entertains the thought that just maybe she is uniquely damaged and emotional and affected, that maybe tenderness and trauma aren't a zero-sum game and that maybe her reasons for being are valid.

But Jesus fuck, she thinks, Madonna sounds nasal in this song. She sounds, like, congested from crying or some shit. She sounds like a therapy session. It's awful. It feels like cathedrals and angels and church. And hell, if one diva's going to cry...

Raven brushes her eye and strokes Kurt's dark hair, her low voice now solely for him. _"It's okay, beautiful boy,"_ she murmurs in his mother tongue. _"Beautiful beautiful baby.."_


	2. White Roses, Part 1

**Thanks to everyone who has favorited, followed, or commented so far! Here's a new chapter. Facts: I was listening to "Holland 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel to inspire this. Like many others, I headcanon that Quicksilver's real name is Pietro and that he only goes by Peter to outsiders, so he will mainly be called Pietro here. I also headcanon that Wanda exists in this universe, and that Pietro's little sister is in fact Lorna, who is a mutant but is not Magneto's daughter in this fic. Oh, and fair warning that there is some _implied_ Cherik in this next two-chapter bit. But it's never really expanded upon or explicitly stated because that's not what this fic is about. **

* * *

_The only girl I ever loved / was born with roses in her eyes..._

Pietro has been running in circles around the city all cold, gray, wet day. Careening, circling it rapidly like a miniature jet, Wallingford to Freemont to the green lawns of the U District to the abject terror that is South Seattle and back again; from the Hill awash in cigarettes and technicolor hair to the Macy's on 4th Avenue & Pine and down to the waterfront.

Going fast enough, he almost doesn't feel the empty space at the side of his arm, the phantom ripped-off conjoined twin. When he thinks about Wanda's eyes, how their amber could glow almost rose-red, about the fight in her, he want to crawl into a coffin. He wants his titanium-bones to shatter against the side of a building so he falls down in a heap. It isn't a matter of loving her. His sister was a part of the fabric of Pietro, as ingrained as his pulse or his stomach. Having her gone is so disconcerting now that he's nauseous 24/7.

Pietro jets halfway up the library escalator and flickers into the display window to return the talking head. The downtown library at 1000 4th Avenue is ten stories high, its moving staircases a bright chartreuse and so loud and slow that they drive Pietro crazy. Built into the wall of the one leading from the first floor to the second is a diorama, an odd display of egg-shaped heads with live-action faces imposed onto them by an unseen projector. The faces chatter back and forth and over each other in monotone, a weird slow algorithm that Pietro doesn't understand. There seems to be beat to it, a rhythm he's not getting.

He pops the talking head back into place beside its companion, watching it illuminate once more by way of its flat projector-face. He doesn't know why, now, he thought that his father would want it. Taking it had seemed like a good idea at the time, but in his hands out of its element the head was lifeless, an oversized white egg that was much heavier than it looked and did nothing. All the art of it was gone. Pietro feels stupid for not realizing that the face wasn't going to come off with it.

He folds his hands in front of him, riding the escalator for a moment at maddening normal speed, and sighs through his lips. He's been doing this all day, nicking things and then putting them back, getting all excited by the art of them and then realizing as soon as he got them that they were all wrong. That's not exactly true, actually. A few he put back out of pure spite, realizing in a moment of pettiness that he hates Erik Lehnsherr, that all he'd like to give him is a smack upside the head and more reasons to worry.

A long, upward-moving chartreuse coffin flickers off-time around Pietro. The pulsing metal steps below his feet, in their bloodied sneakers, whir mechanical. He's miserable, but he can run now, his leg no longer casted to the thigh. He wonders if it's possible to go so fast that time runs backward, so fast that he skids to a stop, out of breath, in his old neighborhood, his old room. Before En Sabah Nur. Before the fire and the maddened dash through Xavier's mansion, before the face of Alex Summers filled his mournful dreams. Before his leg twisted, trapped in the earth around it, cracking like a bendy straw curled the wrong way. (Pietro winces. The sound still haunts him.) Before he collapsed onto Charles Xavier, met with the news that Wanda and Lorna were missing along with many other young mutants not lucky enough to have been in Xavier's care. Before he screamed, violent at the statement that he couldn't call his mom-too risky, Charles told him, said Pietro I'm so sorry but no contact is allowed. Before fleeing the mansion for Seattle, forced to live in a three-bedroom apartment and share a room with Kurt. Before they called him hero, when his life was still his own.

Since the melee caused by En Sabah Nur's four misguided horsemen, Charles is too recognizable to risk staying at the mansion. Raven is too hunted, Erik too notorious, and Pietro, following his heroism, was deemed too powerful. Kurt, besides being conspicuous looking, came mainly because Raven threw a shit-fit at the idea of leaving without him. And so the five left the school in Hank's care, seeking refuge for a few months in Seattle until the media dies down. Seattle: gray and overcast and unassuming. No one will look for them here.

Pietro stares sideways at a long hall of reference books to his right and tells himself that he's being an asshole. His heart contracts and winces like a bloodied, sloshy mop and he fights panic, thinking how he hasn't found anything beautiful or emotional enough yet to really show his dad he's sorry. He's been like this all day, caught in a fevered mutant-loop of speed and guilt and compulsion. Compassion. Whatever.

* * *

"For God's sake, Erik," Charles sighs, "would you stop pacing? Need I remind you this isn't the first time he's done this..."

Erik sits, pushes away a neglected coffee cup, and stares out the apartment window at the December weather. Out there it's a temperate rainforest of concrete and hills, and he cringes to imagine his last live relation caught out in it somewhere-with a runny nose, maybe, and wet shoes. His child, in whom he sees all of his own least favorite vulnerability and stubbornness and temper. The boy seems to possess a horrid talent for showcasing all the things Erik had thought he liked best about himself in such a light that he now has no choice but to realize they're horrible. His boy, an orphan, needing him. He has a right mind to slap the smug little thing across the face.

"It's been days," grimly, is all he says.

Raven appears in the doorway, perhaps flickering into form from her true self, unnerving and spotted. "Asshole," she mutters. "I'm gonna kill him. If he comes back I'm gonna fucking kill him."

"Raven," warns Charles tenderly. He waits, and she's silent, breathing shallow. "Pietro has lost a great deal. He needs your understanding."

"And I guess that makes him the only one, huh?" Raven waits, eyes fixed upon her honorary brother, then lowers her brows. "So... what? Can't you feel anything?"

Charles inhales. "Not clearly. I seem to be getting something about a library and a Ferris wheel, but beyond that he's elusive. We're far from Cerebro, and Pietro's particular thought process has always been difficult to follow. It's his emotions I've always heard clearest."

Erik doesn't seem to have the fortitude to ask him to elaborate, and Raven doesn't care. "I'm going out there," she says, tugging an army-green raincoat from the rack near the front door. "I can't just stay here, I'm going out looking."

For a long moment after the door hinges settle the only sound in the apartment is the faint hum of Hanna Barbera from the TV in Kurt's room. Charles wheels slowly over to the front window, causing Erik to slump into a partial sitting position against the sill, putting him just a smidge above eye level with Charles in his chair. He leans in, his forehead atop Charles' slightly regrown hair.

"She'll find him," Charles says quietly. "And he won't run because he won't recognize her."

Erik sighs.


End file.
